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For this webinar series, participants will automatically be enrolled in all 5 sessions.

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Speaker

Sharon Saline, Psy.D.

Description

In this five-part series, join author, speaker and consultant Dr. Sharon Saline as she guides you through key strategies and techniques to increase executive functioning skills and social-emotional functioning in your students. With an emphasis on neurodivergent learners, she offers tools to address performance issues, anxiety, motivation and perfectionism in your entire student body. You will learn essential information about how to manage challenging situations with more ease and effectiveness.

In this dynamic and interactive workshop designed for teachers, administrators and school counselors, participants will learn concrete strategies to meet learners where they are and help them strengthen essential executive functioning skills. With current research on the developing brain and real-life case examples, Dr. Saline shows you how and why executive functioning skills are critical to the learning process for all students, especially for kids with learning disabilities, ADHD, 2e and level one autism. Exercises designed to improve participants’ understanding of living with learning differences, teaching students with these challenges and brainstorming about specific classroom challenges are threaded throughout the workshop. You will leave this workshop with practical, tangible strategies for identifying and nurturing cognitive and emotional strengths in your students and helping them overcome daily challenges.

To receive PDPs and CEUs, participants must attend all 5 sessions and successfully pass a quiz following Session 5.

In this dynamic and interactive workshop designed for teachers, administrators and school counselors, participants will learn concrete strategies to meet learners where they are and help them strengthen essential executive functioning skills. With current research on the developing brain and real-life case examples, Dr. Saline shows you how and why executive functioning skills are critical to the learning process for all students, especially for kids with learning disabilities, ADHD, 2e and level one autism. Exercises designed to improve participants’ understanding of living with learning differences, teaching students with these challenges and brainstorming about specific classroom challenges are threaded throughout the workshop. You will leave this workshop with practical, tangible strategies for identifying and nurturing cognitive and emotional strengths in your students and helping them overcome daily challenges.

Living in a world that is increasingly unpredictable, today’s kids are more anxious than ever before. In this session, Dr. Sharon Saline, veteran psychologist and author, discusses the grip of anxiety and what counselors, therapists and educators can do to help reduce kids’ worries. After reviewing the physiology and psychology of anxiety, she will show you how to help children and teens change their relationship to worry, realistically evaluate situations, tolerate uncertainty and avoid the pitfalls of negative thinking. Dr. Saline will also discuss the effects of trauma and how to foster growth and resilience. Instead of reassurance and rationalization, you will learn techniques for separating the person from the anxiety, talking to the worry itself and creating effective responses to ‘what ifs’. Dr. Saline offers tools for teaching kids how to realistically evaluate situations, tolerate uncertainty and calm down. You will learn how to transform worry and insecurity into curiosity and confidence.

Do you know students who have a tough time starting and completing things they have to do? Many educators and parents feel frustrated and thwarted in their efforts to teach responsibility, motivation and persistence to children and teens right now, especially those with learning differences. In this session, Dr. Sharon Saline, veteran psychologist and author of “What your ADHD child wishes you knew: Working together to empower kids for success in school and life” and “The ADHD solution card deck,” provides insight and tools on how to successfully motivate all kinds of students both at school and at home. Wrestling with the various demands in their lives, these kids often struggle with anxiety about academics, social issues and personal competence. Building upon a strength-based, collaborative approach, she will show you how to develop and use strategies to teach all-important executive functioning skills related to motivation. Participants will walk away with tools to increase students’ accountability, initiation and follow-through based on collaboration and compassion. When you include these unconventional learners in creating solutions to daily challenges, you’ will increase their buy-in and see more cooperation with fewer protests.

Do you work with neurodivergent youth who struggle with making and keeping friends, speaking in front of others, or joining group activities? It is common for many children and teens with ADHD, ASD, learning disabilities and twice-exceptionality to have experienced significant negative feedback and criticism from others about being different. Concerned about rejection, embarrassment and exclusion, they often feel misunderstood and lonely. They may be victims of bullying, perpetrators or bystanders. The maturing ADHD brain, with its typical challenges of missing social cues, impulsively saying the wrong thing or having big emotional reactions, intensifies these issues. As clinicians and educators, it’s tough to watch them wrestle with these issues, especially when they refuse support. In this session, Dr. Sharon Saline, award-winning author, international speaker and consultant, will show you how to assist these outside-the-box thinkers in learning how to participate more fully in social situations with greater confidence and less self-criticism. After explaining how social anxiety works, she will offer practical tools for teaching kids how to engage more effectively with peers and adults and cope with bullying behaviors. You will leave this webinar with useful strategies to improve conversational skills, initiate and foster friendships and increase their self-esteem.

Do you notice that perfectionism holds certain kids back and limits their personal, academic or social satisfaction and success? Many neurotypical and neurodivergent students struggle with wanting something to be right so much that it becomes difficult to start tasks, assignments and projects or complete them. Although perfectionism can be motivating, it can keep children and teens overfocused on the end result and not the process of getting there. Unrealistic goals and worry about disappointing others contribute to increased anxiety, procrastination and shame. In this webinar, Dr. Sharon Saline will provide you with tools to help kids interrupt and curb the pattern of setting unreasonable standards, engaging in negative comparisons to others and criticizing themselves, especially if they are an outside-the-box thinker. You will walk away with strategies to assist them in managing imposter syndrome and negative self-talk, improving executive functioning skills related to productivity and increasing their capacity for personal compassion. With these resources, they can develop the essential resilience of a growth mindset and accept themselves as they truly are–perfectly imperfect. 

About the Speaker

Sharon Saline, Psy.D., clinical psychologist and author of the award-winning book, What Your ADHD Child Wishes You Knew: Working Together to Empower Kids for Success in School and Life and The ADHD Solution Card Deck. Dr. Saline specializes in working with children, teens, young adults and families living with ADHD, learning disabilities, twice exceptionality and mental health issues. With decades of experience as a clinical psychologist and educator/clinician consultant, she guides families and adults towards effective communication, closer connections and greater understanding. She lectures and facilitates workshops internationally on topics such as ADHD and neurodivergence, executive functioning, the anxiety spectrum, motivation, perfectionism and working with different kinds of learners. Dr. Saline is a regular contributor to ADDitudemag.com and hosts their weekly Facebook Live sessions, blogs for PsychologyToday.com, a featured expert on MASS Appeal on WWLP-TV and a part-time lecturer at the Smith School for Social Work. Her writing has been featured in numerous online and print publications including MSN, The Psychotherapy Networker, Smith College Studies in Social Work, Attention Magazine, Additude Magazine, Psych Central and Inquirer.com. Learn more at www.drsharonsaline.com.

Evaluation

Participants must attend all 5 sessions, either live or recorded, to receive PDPs and/or CEUs. If you are not eligible for PDPs and/or CEUs, you may apply for a Certificate of Attendance.

Membership Information

Most MPY webinars are available ONLY to current staff from member districts and organizations. Public school memberships include police and fire personnel. Former and retired employees and members of committees, including but not limited to, PTO/PTA, PAC, School Improvement Councils, Health Councils, Drug/Alcohol Councils, and school volunteers, are not considered MPY members.

PDPs and CEUs

MPY is an approved Professional Development Provider through the Massachusetts Department of Elementary & Secondary Education (Provider No. F20180079). Professional Development Points (PDPs) are offered for most MPY professional development webinars. PDPs are issued in 10 hour increments, per DESE requirements.

Continuing Education Units (CEUs) are available for clinical staff through the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and the Massachusetts Mental Health Counselors Association, Inc. (MaMHCA). The NASW and the MaMHCA approve each event individually. CEUs may be given in hourly increments.

To receive PDPs and CEUs, participants must pass the quiz.

Event Cancellation Policy

If you are unable to attend a MPY webinar you must cancel, through Bonnie Mullen at bonnie@mpyinc.org, one business day before the webinar.

For MPY hybrid conferences, the date in-person registration closes will be posted on MPY’s website. Virtual conference registration will close one business day before the hybrid conference. You cannot cancel or switch your registration from in-person to virtual after in-person registration closes. Please email Bonnie Mullen at bonnie@mpyinc.org with any questions regarding registration.

  • Enrollment in this course closed on 10/04/2023.

If you are seeking to receive CEUs and/or PDPs, please click Register Now. Once you complete the webinar series, you will be able to take quizzes for CEUs and/or PDPs. Upon completion of each quiz, you will receive a certificate.

All sessions are 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm.

  • Session 1: October 4, 2023, Strengthening Growing Brains – Improve Executive Functioning Skills and Foster Academic and Social Success
  • Session 2: October 18, 2023, Confident and Curious – Reducing Worry and Developing Independence in the Anxious Student
  • Session 3: November 1, 2023, Motivating Neurodiverse and Unconventional Learners – Innovative Interventions and Effective Techniques to Help Kids with ADHD, ASD, 2e and LD Get Started, Persist and Finish Tasks
  • Session 4: November 15, 2023, Excited and Engaged – Strategies and Solutions for Social Anxiety in Neurodivergent Children and Teens
  • Session 5: December 6, 2023, Perfectionism and Imposter Syndrome in Today’s Students – Reducing Stress, Setting Realistic Goals and Improving Productivity for All Types of Learners